Deliberately Designing Culture for Collaboration

Collaborative organisational culture doesn't just happen, it needs conscious and deliberate design and careful nurturing. In this workshop participants will explore what a collaborative organisation culture is, why it matters and how to deliberately design culture.

Culture is "the way we do things here" rather than anything written or prescribed, so understanding how leadership attitudes and behaviors influence and create organisation culture is vitally important to successfully establishing an environment where people are able to bring their whole selves to work, are engaged and positively contribute to the organisation's success.

This session is presented as series of facilitated conversations drawing out the key aspects of organisation culture and showing how it is influenced by a wide variety of factors including structure, geography, promotion policies and practices, the conversations leaders have, what gets rewarded, ignored or punished, relationships and friendships and a wide variety of other factors.

Outline/Structure of the Workshop

10 mins Participants form groups and explore what they understand by culture

10 mins Group activity to identify aspects of culture which are above and below the waterline (externally visible)

10 mins Interact lecture - aspects of culture

5 mins Culture as an elastic band

10 mins Identify the aspects of your own organisation culture

5 mins Interactive lecture - creating a culture book

10 mins Design your own culture book

10 mins What it takes to change culture

10 mins Where to from here - concrete actions and individual commitments

Learning Outcome

By the end of the session the participants will be able to identify areas of culture change they wish to address in their own organisations and will have some resources to help them in their culture design. They will have a clear pathway for the changes they wish to make and tools to support the change.

Shane Hastie - Business Agility - The Hard Questions

schedule 6 months ago

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45 Mins

Keynote

Intermediate

Got a burning question you want an answer to and didn’t quite get it addressed during the day?

This fishbowl-style conversation brings a select group of the day’s speakers and other invited Industry leaders to the stage to answer your questions about the what, why and how of business agility. This is your opportunity to explore vexing questions about business agility with our panelists.

Here’s how it works:

You submit your questions to our volunteers during the conference.

We'll curate and short-list a few questions

Each question will be asked to the panelists and then discussed for 5 minutes.

After that, the audience votes on whether to continue the conversation for a few more minutes or move on.

This is a session where you are in control. Also, this will be run as a fishbowl, which means anyone from the audience can join the panel if they want to contribute.

schedule 10 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

People are unique in their ability to use symbols and images to communicate. After all, that is where the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” comes from. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that enhancing your spoken words with pictures improves the chance that others will understand what you are trying to say.

A picture has a way of showing ideas and solutions that would have remained hidden if you hadn’t picked up a pen. But a good picture doesn’t remove the need for words. It reduces the number of words we use so that the ones left behind are the most important…

So why is visual thinking so important?

Recent studies show that 65% of people learn and retain more information by seeing words - as well as images! In contrast, only 30% of people learn through verbal communication alone. So if you aren’t one of the 65% of visual learners, someone in your team is!

Incorporating visual thinking into your day to day work can:

Reduce the length of meetings by 24%, by providing a shared record of the discussion

Capture emotions, making conversations easier to remember

Help others see the "big picture", by creating powerful visual metaphors

Serve as a reminder of actions agreed by the team

Luckily, you don’t need to be an artist to think in pictures! Join us as we co-create a visual vocabulary you can apply to work or during studying and learning. We will take you through the essential elements needed to create powerful visual concepts.

Scott Ambler - Choose Your WoW! How Agile Software Teams Can Optimize Their Way of Working (WoW)

schedule 10 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Advanced

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

Shane Hastie - The Golden Age of Agile Coaching

schedule 10 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Agile Coaching is a relatively new discipline and there is a lot of misunderstanding about why coaching is useful, what skills and competencies an agile coach needs to have, how they engage with individuals, teams and organisations and how to tell good coaches from mediocre ones.

As someone who wants to become a coach, what skills and competencies do you need to build? There are training courses, but they are not enough. Becoming an effective coach requires much more than book knowledge, it needs deliberate practice and experience working with individuals and teams.

As someone who is considering engaging a coach, what should you look out for and how do you establish the relationship to ensure the best possible outcomes. How do you create the environment where we can grow your own coaches inside an organisation, what is the pathway to competency for an aspiring coach?

In this talk Shane explores these topics and relates it to his own journey to becoming a recognized expert coach through a competency-based assessment (ICE-AC).

schedule 10 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Advanced

If you’re a software developer or architect who wants to play a more influential role in ensuring your software systems are optimised to support business goals, then you need to learn about the benefits and techniques of modern strategic domain-driven design.

Many people think that DDD is about software design patterns, but that’s only a small part, and the least important part of DDD. In fact, Eric Evans wishes he’d focused more on the strategic aspects of DDD in his famous book (Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software) and pushed the tactical coding patterns to the back!

Strategic domain-driven design is about truly understanding the business domain. It involves collaboratively modelling business processes using advanced modelling techniques, like Event Storming and Domain Storytelling, with domain experts on an ongoing basis.

One of the core outcomes of strategic DDD is identifying cohesive modules, known as bounded context. Bounded contexts help you to create a maintainable, comprehensible codebase by isolating dependencies and delineating concepts that reference different classes of business value.

In this talk, you’ll see many of the most effective bounded context design heuristics, recurring patterns in the wild, and you’ll learn how to facilitate those vital modelling sessions so you can lead the adoption of strategic DDD in your organisation.

schedule 10 months ago

45 Mins

Talk

Executive

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back?

Has product delivery improved?

How much happier are users and the business customers?

Are employees empowered and enabled?

Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency, but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.

Rashina Hoda - Becoming Agile vs Doing Agile (Research Talk)

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

After 20 years since the manifesto, the latest state of agile reports more than 80% of organizations as "still maturing" in their agile practice. As agile methods expand beyond small teams and software itself, we are still struggling to answer these questions:

Why is it that some teams are more 'agile' than others even though they all claim to be practicing agile methods?

What all dimensions need to change as teams, managers, and entire organizations attempt to become agile?

How do these dimensions interact with each other?

Overall, what does it take to become agile and how does that differ from doing agile?

This talk is based on my original theory of becoming agile developed from 10+ years of industrial research of agile practice in New Zealand and India, which received the distinguished paper award at the IEEE/ACM international conference on software engineering (ICSE), in 2017.

In this session, I will explain the key dimensions that need to transition during agile transformations, using industrial examples, and highlight what you can do to progress beyond simply doing agile, to harness the most from your agile transformations.

This keynote will add a unique research perspective to the conference program, sharing agile research in an industry-friendly format and delivery style.

Jutta Eckstein - CD – Continuous Delivery and Cultural Difference

schedule 11 months ago

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20 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

DevOps and continuous delivery is typically elaborated technically - what kind of tools, technologies, or skills are necessary for being able to deliver continuously. Often it is forgotten that continuous delivery requires also a culture change - in development, operations, marketing, sales, and not least for the customer.

This can be recognized for example, that although it is technically possible for a team to deliver continuously, but it seems that this delivery isn't welcomed. This means the actual system will not be directly used.

Therefore, in this session by taking into account the necessary cultural change, I want to answer the question how to implement continuous delivery successfully and what kind of pitfalls you need to be aware of when doing so.

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!

For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0

A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8

If you want to stop building useless software, then you have to start understanding your customers. Unfortunately, there’s no magic trick for reading their minds. But there is a simple technique that can help you gain insights and build empathy for them.

Empathy mapping is a simple activity for your team, stakeholders and anyone else who is responsible for delivering products and services. It allows you to collectively explore what your customers see, hear, say & do, as well as consider what they think and feel. This leads to insights about their pain and potential wants which are the keys to building more useful software.

In this session, Diane guides you through building an empathy map, showing you how to use silent brainstorming to encourage everyone to contribute. You will see, first-hand, how easy it is to work collaboratively to create a shared understanding of the customer. And that is the first step to start building software that customers find useful.

Shane Hastie / Evan Leybourn - #NoProjects - Why, What How

schedule 10 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Today success comes from building products people love, creating loyal customers and serving the broader stakeholder community. In this thoughtful exploration on the future of work, the authors explore the past, present and future of the “project”. And why, in today’s fast changing & hyper-competitive world, running a temporary endeavour is the wrong approach to building sustainable products and how #noprojects is fundamentally changing the way companies work.

The metrics by which we have historically defined success are no longer applicable and we need to re-examine the way value is delivered in the new economy. This book starts from the premise that our goal is to create value, for the customer, for the organisation and for society as a whole and shows how to empower and optimise our teams to achieve this.

The authors draw on modern management approaches to provide proven techniques and tools for producing, and sustaining, creative products that go beyond “meeting requirements”. By creating teams who are accountable for business outcomes, engineering for customer delight, and creating value for all stakeholders - profitability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement are all increased.

This book is far more than just a catalogue of practices and tools which you can apply in your product development. It contains inspirational stories from individuals, teams and organisations who have switched to this new way of thinking and working. It exposes the risks on the pathway and how others have overcome these obstacles

schedule 10 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Executive

A resilient organizational can not only adapt and respond to incremental change but more importantly, can respond to sudden disruptions and also, be the source of disruption in order to prosper and flourish.

The traditional risk management approach focuses too much on defensive (stopping bad things happen) thinking versus a more progressive (making good things happen) thinking. Being defensive requires consistency across the organization and this is where methodologies like Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) come in. However, PDCA approach does not bake in the required progressive thinking and flexibility required for a fast company organization which operates in a volatile environment.

Professor David Denyer of Cranfield University has recently published a very interesting research report on Organizational Resilience. He has identified the following four quadrants across to help us think about organizational resilience:

preventative control (defensive consistency)

mindful action (defensive flexibility)

performance optimization (progressive consistency)

adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility)

In this talk, I'll share my personal experience of using this thinking to help an organization to scale their product to Millions of users. I've dive deep into how we structured our organization for Structural Agility and how we set-up a very lightweight governance model using OKRs to drive the necessary flexible and progressive thinking.

Todd Little - The Foundation of Business Agility: Feedback Loops

schedule 10 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

At the core to any agile approach is the ability to manage for uncertainty. This is only possible through a process of continuous learning which requires active feedback loops. Linear approaches are doomed to fail in a world of uncertainty. Feedback incorporates new knowledge which enables learning. The key is maintaining healthy feedback loops which will enable success. An iterative approach with broken feedback loops is similarly doomed.

Not only is this the foundation of business agility, empiricism is the foundation of the scientific method, Shewart-Deming process improvement cycles, and the Lean Startup model. Healthy agile approaches incorporate multivariate closed loop process control.

In the original book on Scrum, Ken Schwaber talks about his discovery of empiricism by trying to sell waterfall solutions to Chemical Engineers at DuPont Chemical. Todd’s background is as a Chemical and Petroleum engineer, so his journey was different. Empiricism was natural for him, so when people started talking about agility it fit nicely with the model he was already using. It was even better when the conversation became about “Business Agility.”

Fennande van der Meulen / Maartje Wolff - Play your way to success - How to use Lego Serious Play to foster team bonding and happiness at work

schedule 10 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

As a child, we loved to play. These years of unbound creativity, fun and flow may seem lost for some of us. Playing can be a powerful tool to unleash that creative source of fun and flow. Lego Serious Play is a well-known and tested way of tapping into that source. In this introductory workshop, we show you the power of playing, Lego and how this enhances happiness at work in your team.

About the workshop

This highly entertaining and interactive workshop focuses on playing with Lego Serious Play as a tool for a group, to discuss values, happiness, and effectiveness. In one and a half hour, we explain about the background, but we focus on you working with the bricks.

Maaret Pyhajarvi - Working without a Product Owner

schedule 11 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Intermediate

For a decade of software product agile, we had worked in a structure where business responsibility of what to build was allocated to a product owner and the responsibility of how to build it was allocated to a development team. Product owner would maintain a backlog, act as voice of the customers. Until one day we realized that the choice of what to build or fix is hard, and critical to everyone’s success. If we wanted to do it poorly, we delegated it to a single product owner.

We started a no product owner experiment. For three months, we experienced the development team delivering multitudes of value to what we had grown to expect, and innovate customer-oriented solutions in direct collaboration with customers. Team satisfaction and happiness bloomed. The experiment turned into a continuous way of working.

Customer-focused team directly in touch with their customers performs better without a proxy. Join me to learn how the decision power shared for everyone in the team transformed the ability to deliver, and how collaboration is organized with product experts and business representatives.

Shane Hastie - ICAgile Presents Training from the Back of the Room

schedule 11 months ago

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960 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Make your training classes engaging and ensure the learning sticks!

Drawing on Sharon Bowman’s best-selling books Training from the BACK of the Room and Using Brain Science to Make Training Stick, this two-day program explores how the human brain really learns, which is very different from traditional assumptions about learning.

Join this class to experience the most current “cognitive neuroscience” about effective instruction.

schedule 9 months ago

480 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

If your team uses velocity for planning but you don't find it very useful, this workshop is for you.

If your manager or scrum master or other pseudo-authority figure keeps obsessing over your velocity, this workshop is for you.

If you want to know about better ways to forecast when a piece of work will be done or how to gather data that actually helps your team, this workshop is for you.

In this interactive workshop, Doc and Diane share insights into metrics and how they can be used to improve your team's performance. From cumulative flow diagrams to lead time distribution charts to forecasting using Monte Carlo simulation and more, you'll come away with the ability to better forecast when work will be done and better diagnose issues with your process.

Jez Humble - Accelerate: Implementing DevOps and Continuous Delivery

schedule 9 months ago

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480 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. The practice of continuous delivery sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, low-risk delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and IT operations, teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes—no matter what the size of the product or the complexity of the enterprise environment. This full-day workshop spends the morning providing an overview of the principles and practices behind devops and continuous delivery, and discusses how to implement these paradigms. In the afternoon we take a deep-dive into implementation specifics such as continuous integration, continuous testing, infrastructure management, architecture, and low-risk deployments (including database changes).

Suzanne Nottage - GO WITH THE FLOW: Your Scrum team is interrupted 2,000 times per Sprint. Let's get our teams' 'flow' back.

schedule 10 months ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

This talk is for people who care about their Scrum teams, and how to tackle one of the most insidious threats to our team's productivity: the tyranny of interruptions.

In 45 minutes you'll learn why interruptions are endemic in some organisations (but not others), how disruptive they are to teams (it can take 15 minutes to re-focus after each interruption), how the impact productivity and team happiness, and several secrets from mature Scrum teams for reducing interruptions for individuals and teams.

My talks are always interactive and this talk includes a short, fun game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is to our productivity. It's simple enough you can play it back in your company after the conference.

The context for this talk is described below.

The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. This is "death by 1000 paper cuts for your teams' productivity." Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

Ask the Scrum teams around you whether they regularly deliver their committed work per Sprint and you'll find that most teams (very) seldom complete their planned work in a sprint, let alone two consecutive Sprints.

The material for the talk is distilled from original research I conducted with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

I selected teams in Australia because the culture is relatively open to discussing challenges and is willing to experiment with new ways of working: hierarchy and tradition are arguably less influential than in some other cultures. (For the record, I'm not Australian...I'm a New Zealander and British, with experience working in the US and Australia as well.)

I delivered this talk the LAST Conference (July 2018, Melbourne, Australia) to a full room and it received one of the highest feedback scores from attendees at the Conference because the topic is so relevant to contemporary teams.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for people and teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

Please vote for my topic if you would like to help your teams optimise their performance and increase their happiness by reducing interruptions. Thank you.